[ANIMATED HONEY-JARS]
It was one evening not long after our afternoon on Bungalow Hill, where Mary had found the mealy-bugs in the runways of an ant's nest under a stone, and I had told her about the clever little brown ants and their aphid cattle in the Illinois corn-fields. Ever since that afternoon Mary had been asking questions about ants, and so this evening I was translating bits to her from a new German book about ants. It told about the cruel forays of the hordes of the great fighting and robbing Ecitons of the Amazons; of the extraordinary mutually helpful relations between the Aztec ants and the Imbauba tree of South America, which result in the ants getting a comfortable home and special food from the tree, while the tree gets protection through the Aztecs from the leaf-stealing Ecodomas. It told of the ants that live in the hollow leaves of the Dischidia plants in the Philippine Islands, and the way the plants get even by sending slender aerial rootlets into the leaves to feed on the dead bodies of the ants that die in the nests. It told of the ants in this country that build sheds of wood-pulp over colonies of honey-dew insects or ant-cattle on the stems of plants; of the fungus-garden ants of South America and Mexico and Texas that bite off little pieces of green leaves and make beds of them in special chambers in their underground nests, so that certain moulds grow on these leaf-beds and provide a special kind of food for the ant-gardeners. It told of the ants that make slaves of other ants, and get to depend so much on these slaves that they can't even care for their own children, and it told about the honey-ants of the Garden of the Gods that make some of the workers in each nest—but that's what this story is going to tell about, so we had better wait.
But it was all a veritable fairy-story book, as any good book about the ways and life of ants must be. And Mary listened eagerly. She liked it. When going-home time came she had, however, one insistent question to ask. "What can I see?" she demanded. "What can I see right away; to-morrow?"
"Mary you can—see—to-morrow,"—and I think rapidly,—"you can see—to-morrow,"—still thinking,—"ah, yes—yes you can; you can see them to-morrow."
"But what can I see to-morrow?"
"Why the animated honey-jars; didn't I say what? No? Well, to-morrow we can go to see them; in the Arboretum at the foot of the big Monterey pine. I think I remember the exact place."
"But I thought the honey-ants were only in Mexico and New Mexico and Colorado," says Mary. "Didn't the book say that?"